This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on April 29, 2016.
KUALA LUMPUR: Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) is not ruling out the possibility of revising its pricing and product offerings amid intense competition in the industry.
Its managing director-cum-chief executive officer, Tan Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, said product pricing and offerings are always market-driven, but TM will also compete on pricing whenever there is a need to do so.
“We are in a competitive environment. We will compete on price when we see fit, but for TM, we will always want to compete in value. So, it is not just pure pricing. [What is] more important is the value we can provide to our customers,” he told a media conference after TM’s annual general meeting yesterday.
Zamzamzairani said TM recently introduced new broadband packages to get customers to upgrade their plans.
“We have just introduced new plans, Unifi Advanced and Unifi Pro, which provide customers even better experience with higher speed and value-added packages. Once we have these high-end packages, it is about how well we can persuade them to upgrade,” he said.
TM’s main revenue contributor, broadband services, is facing competition from rival Time Dotcom Bhd. For instance, for a 100Mbps (megabytes per second) plan, TM is charging RM299 a month, against Time Dotcom’s RM149.
Nonetheless, Zamzamzairani said the group is seeing encouraging growth, with customers moving up to higher speeds.
“About 46% of our customers are now using packages that have more than four Mbps,” he said.
Aside from broadband, TM is about to join the already-saturated mobile network market this year through its 72.9%-owned subsidiary Packet One Networks (M) Sdn Bhd (P1), which had recently rebranded itself as “Webe”.
Zamzamzairani said the launching of Webe is “proceeding as planned”. It is currently undergoing tests with a close user group, and is expected to be available commercially by the middle of this year.
TM shares closed one sen lower or 0.15% at RM6.68, with a market capitalisation of RM25.1 billion.